This weblog of an English teacher at a Franconian "Gymnasium" type secondary school is meant to provide students with additional, class-related material they might be interested in - plus the odd personal comment on the world at large ;)

Sunday, October 28, 2007

to nix = to cancel, to refuse - another of those great Germanisms, just like the ever-popular "blitzkrieg", "weltschmerz", "angst" and such (look 'em up in your ALD, I'm not kidding!)This piece of vocabulary is often used in business relations - hence, obviously, this license plate on a Mercedes I encountered a while back in London - Highgate.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

What I took for SPAM at first turned out to be for real. If only I knew how he got his hands on my "official" (school) e-mail address and even knows my first name. Kinda creepy.Still, this sounds interesting:Current, the media company I co-founded six years ago with my partner Joel Hyatt, just last week launched a new web site that integrates television and the Web in an unprecedented way. It provides, as never before, a platform for citizens to make the media their own.

One of the features I'm most excited about on Current.com is called Viewpoints. Viewpoints is a virtual town hall where you can share your opinions, in video, about the issues that matter in the 2008 election: from global warming to government eavesdropping, and many more.

This digital town hall is already bustling, and you can find viewpoints from me and from a lot of people, including the candidates running for President. Come and listen to their positions and, more importantly, tell them and the rest of the world what you think!

Since Viewpoints is the only place on the Web where you can easily share your view in video, my hope is that you'll take this opportunity to go toe-to-toe with the pundits on TV and help contribute to a new platform for public discourse. All it takes is a webcam and 60 seconds.

And, since we'll be taking the most popular and most compelling viewpoints and airing them on Current TV -- now available in 52 million homes around the world -- you may very well get your voice heard on our global TV network.

I look forward to seeing and hearing you on Current.com, as we deepen the discussion on these important topics:

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

I wanted to spare you the "...but it still sucks" punchline, but I really can't resist the temptation, because of the double meaning working in two languages, albeit in a different way. Non-German speakers: "saugen", the literal translation of "to suck", can be used as a slang word for downloading data ("leeching"), which is, of course, what this precursor of the modem ("acoustic coupler") could be used for. Darn slow though it was...